Back At One
Ugh! deep sigh
So I think I mentioned that I’ve done a lot of inner child, healing work. If I haven’t mentioned it then I’m saying it now. I started reconnecting with my younger self some years back. I don’t remember exactly when all this began but I’m certain it’s been over five years now. I don’t remember what prompted me to start connecting with this part of myself but I had a suspicion that it would be the key to unlocking so much of my healing that I felt stuck in at the time. The meditation was powerful. It took months for my inner child to even feel safe to connect with the grown, older version of me. After a series of meditations where I continued to come back and meet with my younger self I could sense a transformation.
But before all of that happened I was stuck. For years I was plagued with depression so debilitating that I felt like I was always carrying an elephant around. Sadness, deep sadness, had been such an integral part of my life for so long that I hardly knew any other way to be. I yearned to have a smile that felt genuine or to know what peace and joy felt like. And safety!? Huh! I couldn’t even tell you what safe felt like because I was living in a perpetual state of fear within my body. By the time I got to my mid-thirties I was sick and tired of living in gray. I wanted color, vibrancy and light. However, when you have been in continuous loop of always seeing the world as harmful and dangerous, the opposite can feel much more terrifying.
Healing was a dirty word to me. Plus I didn’t want to ACTUALLY acknowledge that I had been spiritually bypassing my way through life. Are you kidding me? You mean to tell me those crystals weren’t getting rid of all that negativity stuck in my body and what I needed to really do was open up my damn mouth and TALK! Nope. Give me a shiny rock over a vulnerable session with a therapist any day! I did that for years. Until finally something broke, or should I say cracked. Just like one of my favorite lyrics from one of my favorite songs “Rise” by Willow Smith and Jahnavi Harrison…
“I need to live for higher purpose, someone’s knocking on the door from the inside.”
That knocking was me. My younger self, my higher self, my future self, all calling to me in the moment to start the journey of healing. When you talk about healing the concept seems so vague and broad. What type of healing? What are you healing? What does healing even look like? The last question is often the hardest to answer because what I need for healing is certainly not what you need. Someone could look at my process and say “Well that’s not ACTUALLY healing cause you aren’t DOING anything.” To the lay person, anyone who is not me living in this body could make that statement. But on the inside there are all sorts of combustions and synapses happening that are breaking down old worlds and creating whole new universes.
I remember that moment of asking myself How do I heal? Where do I even start? And that can feel the most intimidating. Guess what folks!? I’m right back to square one again. Just earlier today I noticed some wounds around my biological mother that I thought I had tended to. Upon further investigation it is apparent that I had just barely scratched the surface. As I was driving home I said out loud I have a Mother wound I need to heal and then proceeded to sigh and grunt loudly in the car as I shouted HERE WE GO AGAIN!!!!!
I know that healing is non-linear. I know that healing is a never ending journey that only stops when I take my last breath (and even then who knows what’s on the other side). In either case I find myself right back at the starting line again, unsure of where to go, how to begin. Since I’ve been at this for some time now I can safely say that I feel slightly more confident than I did when I first started. At least now I know that this is gonna be a long road with twists, turns, loopdy loos, and lord knows what else. I’m not leaning on my old practices of numbing and self-medicating to distract me from the pain and the journey ahead. I know that the only way to truly heal something is to feel my way through it. That’s the only thing that works.
So here I go. And you’re coming along with me.